Author: eastbay

Announcing the 2016 East Bay Anarchist Book event, December 17 at the Humanist Hall

This year’s theme is Community: for good or ill. We willl be celebrating, defining, and exploring the concept and reality of community: the good and bad things about being part of a group of people who inspire, aggravate, and confound us.

Community has long been a word that is shorthand for what we lack in our current situation; it is one of the words that we use to cover the vast terrain that we feel, as anarchists, has been taken from us by a variety of institutions, most notably the state and capitalism. It is both something that we long for and idealize, and also something that we exist within all the time–most of us are in some kind of relationship with other anarchists, as broken and confusing as we all are.

How have we been betrayed and supported by our expectations and assumptions of community and our actual communities? How do we reasonably examine our own preconceptions and our actual experiences of this crucial part of our lives? As anarchists we are constantly negotiating between our beautiful dreams and our complicated practices; how does that play out on the terrain of community?

Come and talk to other people who have and are and will be your community members; find out what they’re doing and how it might effect your life.

For anarchists the idea of community represents both an ideal and a practice. The ideal community is either explicitly anarchist, one that concerns itself with an anti-authoritarian rigor, challenging culturally normative standards like beauty, heterosexuality, diet, and bigotry or it is a broader group that allows anarchists to live within it, and listens to their concerns. The practice for anarchists, by and large, is identical to that of our neighbors— isolation, slavery to job and routine, and association only with a small subset of who is possible, even just within a geographical area.

If an anarchist vision of community is to be understood as radically different from the fractured community of neighbors or the partial communities of religious groups, it must exist along a particular fault line. On the one hand it has to provide the mechanisms of survival that humans need from other people—shared resources, a sense of belonging, and certain kind of camaraderie—and on the other it has to both model and concern itself with its own formation in a future time without the state or capitalist social relations.

On December 5th of 2015 we will host the third annual East Bay Anarchist Bookfair where we will present the projects and people who have comprised the East Bay Anarchist community for decades. Our website is at http://eastbayanarchist.com/

From the P(rogress)R(esistance) T.E.A.M.

Salutations,

Anarchists talk more about living than dying, but raging all around us is a debate about whether we have entered a new age, what has become known as the Anthropocene. While academics debate when this age might have started, it is beyond debate that homo sapiens have dramatically and permanently altered the planet. Despite living in an age where we are faced with the horrors of mass extinction, global climate catastrophe and the increased desperation of governments to secure resources and borders, anarchists have made few contributions to these discussions. They remain largely in the realm of scientists, academics, politics and business.

Non-anthropocentric views and values are few and far between in regional anarchist scenes. Is the “non-human” an inhuman topic? These topics are so taboo that even approaching them with other anarchists can elicit accusations of fascism, genocide apology, and counterrevolutionary armchair misanthropy. Objections of cruelty, abjection, and horror invariably accompany contemporary talk of the “non-human” aspects of our “crisis,” but do they have to? Can there be an anarchism that lives outside the box of the human social project?

Dates & Location
The East Bay Anarchist Bookfair will be held at the Humanist Hall (http://humanisthall.net/wp/) 390 27th Street, Oakland, CA, 94612-3104 on December 5th from 10AM to 6PM. It will include conversations and books during the day.

How to request a table
The main room of the hall will house booksellers, distributors, independent presses, and activist groups from all over North America but with an emphasis on the Bay Area and California. If you’d like to table this year, provide a short description of your group and the materials you intend to distribute. The fee for tabling at the event is 10% of your sales (minimum of $40 which is due with table confirmation).

Logistics
Further info about the event space, table placement, presentation locations, accessibility, child care, ASL translation and other logistical details will be added as we know and plan more.

The deadline to request a table is November 1st, 2015. Drop a line at tables@eastbayanarchist.com